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Cliopher
It was early evening when Cliopher strolled back across the village green, humming quietly to himself. His conversation with Mrs Alimond had cleared up several points of confusion in Basil’s scattered receipts and given him another picture of his dear cousin’s life on Alinor. The Alimond children knew Clio well and were full of questions for his mysterious new uncle, and young enough to ask them without embarrassment.
He had enjoyed the afternoon immensely and now he could look forward to a quiet evening straightening out the final set of accounts for Basil. He might, on reflection, add a note to the proposed business plan to suggest investigating Mrs Alimond’s willingness to bake—or at least to share the recipe of the seed cake she had plied him with.
The village streets seemed quieter than usual and there was a hubbub of people clustered around the courtyard of the inn. Curious, Cliopher quickened his steps. There seemed to be something going on around the terrace, where benches and tables spilled out across the garden.
His pace slowed as he came around the corner of the building. There was someone standing on the back porch, raised slightly above the crowd.
Somebody tall and thin, wearing bright silks and holding—holding a beautiful harp.
Cliopher stopped in his tracks, thankful for the fading light and the cluster of curious villagers. The man on the terrace had inclined his head to listen to a slim woman in dark academic dress.
Domina Black.
Which meant—
He knew, of course he knew. But he had never seen his lord like this, moving freely, shining in the yellow lamplight that spilled down from the back of the inn.
Long fingers slid down the strings of the harp, sending a series of bright notes shivering into the air. A rustle of expectation spread across the crowd, then stilled.
His voice was beautiful, baritone, effortlessly filling the expectant evening. Familiar and strange at once.
Cliopher stepped back. There was a sturdy tree here, one of the distinctive tall and spreading flowering trees of the Woods Noirell. The bark was cool and rough under his fingers. He sank back against it and shut his eyes.
The song curled around the edges of the night. This was—this was the actual Fitzroy Angursell, singing Kissing the Moon. The low sweet melody crept into his aching heart like fresh water after a shipwreck, like the softness of a blanket under his palms, like the first tentative touch of a hand, taking his.
It was foolish. It was real. Cliopher could picture how real it was: the Moon Lady herself, her pale arms holding his lord’s slim shoulders, her shining hair spilling across his face as she leaned in—
He was singing along, he realised. Quietly at first, but then more loudly—he wasn’t alone, he could hear the chorus rising. So many people in the crowd were singing, and he couldn’t be the only one with tears running down his cheeks.
He was glad to be in shadow behind the tree trunk though. It was easier. If he could see his lord's face he might feel—well, it would be difficult. Better to be lost in this warm, velvety evening.
Cliopher found himself playing with the shell he had in his pocket, his fingers running over the ribbed join. A small, ordinary, white shell, in two halves. He hardly knew where he had picked it up, or why he had started carrying it with him. The texture was finer than the bark of the tree, but the rough ridges were helping, somehow, to ground him.
And then the singing stopped.
There was a breathless silence, the sort that came just before a storm of applause, but Cliopher wasn’t attending to it. Because the last verse of that song would flow so perfectly into the first verse of this song, and he was so used to singing them to himself in the quiet of his room and making that transition, and somehow without realising it—he had kept going.
He nearly faltered when he realised that he was the only one singing. In the parts of the crowd he could see, heads were turning towards him. He felt exposed despite the friendly shadow. The trunk of the tree was solid behind his back. He could, he would finish the song. He owed Fitzroy that much—not to trip over his words mid-performance—his ears felt like flames at the thought. It seemed entirely impossible that he, Cliopher Mdang, was singing where he could be heard by Fitzroy Angursell—who was also his Radiancy—
He worried at the shell in his hand. He was singing with a strength he didn't know he had. But of course he was—he couldn't offer his lord anything less than—it couldn’t be anything small—
The last couple of verses of the song he had chosen were most certainly not acceptable in public. He sang them anyway, his eyes shut, his heart soaring painfully out over a chasm he couldn't—
He finished, and took a deep and shaky breath, and—
His Radiancy, who was Fitzroy Angursell, launched without hesitation into another song. One that Cliopher had never heard performed live. He gasped, and his fingers pressed together, and there was a tiny cracking sound and the shell broke in two between them. He had been worrying at it too hard. He clutched the halves, feeling the bite as the clean edge of the break dug into his fingers. It was real, and so was he.
It helped him start the next song.
People in the crowd were looking back and forth now, between him and Fitzroy Angursell, who was his Radiancy. Whenever one of them finished, the other picked up with something new, and even more obscure.
Song for song, their voices twining together when the verses mingled. The sound of Fitzroy's harp accompanying Cliopher's voice. Cliopher's face was still wet but he was hardly thinking about that now, or about where Rhodin was, or about what he was going to do next. There was only the music.
And then—he had no idea how long later—Fitzroy started a song Cliopher had never heard before. Cliopher lifted away from the tree, shaking with delight. New music, from Fitzroy Angursell?
A line. Another. A pause, a break, a laugh. Lots of laughter. Cliopher's heart was beating within him like a big steel drum, his whole body shaking. A female voice, "I don't think you finished that one!"
The spell broke.
Coming back to himself was like waking from a fever. Cliopher gripped his shell and pushed off from the tree, hunching his shoulders as people tried to clap him on the back and congratulate him. The only thing he could think was that he needed to breathe, to be quiet, to—
There was applause now, raucous and all around him. Face burning, he ducked around a corner and away. He wasn’t even sure where he was going, but eventually he came out between the houses onto a wooden jetty beside the quiet darkness of the river. He stumbled over the uneven boards, following it right to the end, found a bollard, and sat.
There was only half a shell in his hand. He must have lost the rest of it. He must have left it behind. It didn't matter. It couldn't.
Fitzroy
I should know the voice of the singer. I knew this, even as we spiralled into the next song as if we'd been singing together for years and not for something less than an hour. His voice was lyrical and clear and resonant—and beautifully, wonderfully, tantalizingly familiar.
I should know him. I did know him; I was certain of it.
We sang and we sang and we sang. I was entirely overwhelmed, delighted, entranced by this man who knew my songs as well as I did—better, perhaps, given how I sometimes let his voice take the lead as my own memories failed to give up my own words quickly enough.
No one noticed. Everyone was caught in the spell of our eager—not competition, this was too lovely for that—duet, but one sung across my entire repertoire rather than simply one brief song.
I was mesmerized. Captivated. Enchanted.
I was also out of songs. I fumbled to a stop. Considered for a moment. Sang another line. Faltered. Around me—around us, despite the fact my glorious partner had never stepped forward, had been singing from the shadows somewhere I couldn't make out for the entirety of our performance, this moment was most certainly ours—everyone laughed in wonderous delight. The sound billowed up to the sky, filling the green and the Woods beyond with shimmering echoes of joy and amusement. My heart was bursting and leaping and crackling with flames that were warm and bright and oh so full. I could only think of the moment my hands cradled Kip's, as we held a soft-burning ember between us and a word echoed through our minds. Beloved, we'd said so silently then.
This flame was like that—except a thousandfold bigger and brighter and burning as my mind danced with a feverish joy I didn't want to release. But I—I couldn't hold it. My mind came entirely undone as the words failed to come.
When he didn't respond—that magnificent man, that entrancing singer, the one my heart was certain it knew—I glanced around wildly. My eyes caught on Jullanar but she simply laughed and gave a shrug that everyone nearby could see. “I don't think you ever finished that one!” she said to the audience's delight.
And then the magical moment was over and there was applause, and shouted compliments, and pats on the back that were startling and unexpected and shockingly difficult after so very long without.
I pulled away, carefully easing myself through the exuberant crowd, not wanting to draw the concern and worry of my friends. Jullanar and Sardeet and Masseo and Pali deserved this evening of utter delight without my suddenly tentative, prickly nerves getting in the way. I wanted to be fine and I wasn’t. I wanted to find him, but I couldn't as I had no idea who he was except that I knew desperately that I should.
As I navigated through the crowd, space opened up, a snaking line that sent me not back towards the Inn and my room but towards the river. The stars overhead sparkled as I made it away from the crowd. I peered ahead, unsure of my steps. Magic unfurled around me, crackling with expectation.
I forgot the crowd, left it behind, and stepped into a new song, a new story. At the edge of the green, on the approach to the river, my eyes caught on a brilliance in the dark of the grasses and rocks—a flicker of white, something small, something—
A shell, I realized, scooping it gently into the palm of my hand. It filled my palm perfectly as if meant to be there.
I studied it closely but there was no aura of magic, no curse, no enchantment. It was simply a small white shell—common and ordinary, except while I was close to a river, I was nowhere near a beach.
I glanced up from the shell, my eyes following the path of the river to an old wooden jetty. Not long, cast entirely in shadow except for a luminous figure sitting on something, swathed in starlight, staring at the water.
My heart leaped—
The figure was as familiar as my own—more so given how many years I had avoided looking at my own body, not wanting to see what I had become, not wanting to dwell on the tracery of bindings that I couldn't help but see each time I looked down at my hands.
For so long, all I had been given to look at—to look at me—was Kip. I would recognize him anywhere. At the side of a busy street in Gorjo City, taking a coffee and arresting everyone around him with his words. At the end of a jetty, his back hunched slightly as if protecting himself from a wind, as if sheltering from the noise of the crowd, from the music, from—
I knew then who had been singing. Stars, how had I missed it? Kip sang the same way he ranted about issues that mattered— the Sea Train, the Stipend, the Postal Service. He sang with his whole heart—fierce and full and utterly captivating.
I shut my eyes, recalling how Kip had always hummed my Aurora as he worked—day after day, year after year, entirely oblivious to the fact he was doing it. Every time had been a balm to my heart, a reminder that I'd once existed, a secret knowledge that was mine and mine alone. Kip loved my Aurora.
I had never known—had never been able to ask—whether Kip knew any of my other songs besides Aurora. I simply took heart that he knew and loved that one.
To think if I had been able to ask, that his answer would have been, all of them. Knowing Kip, he'd have answered the question the same way he answered any of my questions—as if it was nothing special that he knew every song in my repertoire. As if it was nothing that might cause surprise or wonder or amazement.
I watched him at the end of the jetty—shoulders hunched, head down, shadowed despite the mantle of starlight. What was he thinking? What was he telling himself? How was he trying to bury what had happened between us—the knowledge of how perfectly our voices had fit together?
We'd always fit together. I'd known that from the first day Kip had walked into my study, from the first joke we had shared, from the moment he'd first met my eyes—much as that moment had terrified me. We'd always fit together—and I'd never once been able to say so. Not then.
This wasn't then. This was now—nearly as far from the Palace of Stars as we could possibly be. I curled my fingers gently around the shell in my hand and stepped forward.
“Kip,” I said softly, moving across the creaky wood. “You're here—you're—”
Cliopher
The breeze over the water had cooled his flaming cheeks, but the darkness and quiet could do little to settle his thoughts. He forced himself to open his hand and acknowledge its contents—a shell missing its other half.
Cliopher always seemed to drop the things that mattered most to him.
He had imagined… had hoped… that Artorin Damara might—but he had nothing worthy of offering to Fitzroy Angursell, whose fire had lit up the whole of the green, a welcoming blaze that warmed the hearts of everyone present in a way his Radiancy’s never could. Cliopher had fed that fire through all his long years of service so that one day it would burn free… Now he needed to let it go. It was enough. It had to be.
The wind kicked up, causing the swollen wood of the old jetty to creak and moan. He could almost hear his Radiancy’s—Fitzroy’s—voice, a soft breath that curled around him as he looked out over the river. “Kip. You’re here. You’re…”
Cliopher choked on a sob that mercifully drowned out the imagined voice, shaking his head in annoyance at his own tears. He was happy—he was—that Fitzroy had found his friends—had found himself. It was everything Cliopher had wanted for him. If he had wanted more for himself… Well, everyone had always laughed at what he wanted. Surely he should be used to it by now.
At Lesuia, he had tossed a shell into the fire and wished for his Radiancy’s happiness. That seemed as good a use as any for the one he was holding now. He closed his eyes and said the familiar little prayer.
When he opened them, his Radiancy—Fitzroy Angursell—was kneeling beside him.
"Kip."
Oh, that voice. The one he had delighted in every day for centuries. He had thought he knew every shading of emotion in the rich, resonant baritone, but there was something new in the sound of his name. Something that made his heart beat faster, and the knot in his throat tighten, and the tears begin to spill down his cheeks in earnest.
"My dear, what's wrong?" He heard, but could not answer.
"Singing with you was a gift, astonishing, and I—of course it was you, who else could it be?" He heard the wonder and laughter in his—in Fitzroy Angursell's voice. "But you're crying. What's the trouble? What did I do to hurt you so?" Gentle fingers on his cheek, wiping away his tears, causing a fresh burst.
Cliopher shook his head in mute denial, wordless in his grief, his shame, his inability to stop crying. His Radiancy’s beautiful hands cupped his face, fingers like lines of flame on Cliopher's cheeks, and he wanted nothing more than to lean into them, to rest his head in his lord's hands and weep.
His lord, who was Fitzroy Angursell. Who held a crowd spellbound with nothing but his voice, who bargained with gods and danced through legend and sang his great heart across nine worlds and beyond. What was Cliopher, next to that?
The party on the green had not stopped just because its principal entertainment had disappeared; music and raucous laughter drifted towards them on the wind. His—Fitzroy should be there, joyous and wild and free, instead of out here with Cliopher. The music should be Fitzroy’s, the laughter should be Fitzroy's. It wasn't right.
Cliopher pulled his face away from his lord's gentle warmth, though it was one of the most difficult things he'd ever done. He turned and dabbed at his face with his cuffs, struggling to regain control, if only for a few moments.
"Your friends will be wondering where you've gone." His friends—the Red Company. Cliopher's heart rejoiced at the thought, even as it broke a little further. That his Radiancy had found such friends, such love: it was all Cliopher had ever wanted for him. Even—even if it was not what Cliopher had wanted for himself.
"I'm here with my friend now," Fitzroy said softly. "At least, I hope I am." There was a little catch in the beautiful voice.
Cliopher looked up, instinct to hide forgotten in a wave of indignation. "Of course you are! My—Fitzroy, how can you doubt it?"
Fitzroy's face was very close to his. His golden eyes were very wide, full of concern and other emotions he could not name.
"Jullanar likes to say that friends share their hearts with one another," Fitzroy said. "Can you not trust me with yours, my dear Kip?"
Trust. As if he would not, as if he had not, trusted his Radiancy with anything, everything.
"It's not a question of trust," he rasped, clenching his hands on his lap so that he would not reach for Fitzroy's hands. (Five minutes, to break a habit of centuries.) The jagged edge of the shell dug into his palm. "It's not—you don't need to worry about me."
Fitzroy's eyes shaded deep and sad. "Don't I? You were going to say it's not important, weren't you?"
Cliopher nodded past a fresh spate of tears, at how effortlessly his Radiancy knew him, saw him, had always known.
"Kip," Fitzroy said, soft and low, a caress of the word on his tongue. "You are important. Anything that makes you weep like this—" he raised his hands again to Cliopher's face, but stopped short of touching, his hands hovering in the air between them "—how could I not think it important?"
"I should have known," Cliopher whispered at last. He shook his head at the wreck of his precious, foolish dream. "Fitzroy Angursell. I should have known you were never for me."
Fitzroy stared at him, his face disbelieving. "Kip, I have been yours since the day you walked into my office and saw me, instead of the emperor. You rescued me when I had lost myself. If I'm Fitzroy Angursell again, it is entirely due to you. Please, Kip." This was said so softly, so earnestly, that Cliopher couldn't help himself. He looked into the limpid gold of those beloved eyes to see them shimmering with tears.
Cliopher had always trusted this man. He could choose to trust him now. He stood and offered his hand to pull his friend up and into a fierce hug.
"You have taught me quite a few methods of greeting people," Fitzroy said, his voice muffled in Cliopher's hair, "but I think this might be my favorite."
Cliopher clung to his lord, Fitzroy Angursell, without shame. Great shudders rocked him, but he was held, close and warm and sure. Gentle hands stroked his hair, ran down his back. Fitzroy murmured softly to him, and Cliopher buried his face in his neck and wept himself out, at last.
At length, Cliopher quieted, and he lifted his head. Fitzroy's face shone with streaks of his own tears, Cliopher saw with a twist of his heart. He stepped back, just a little, out of Fitzroy's arms, and rummaged in the pockets of his overrobe for a handkerchief. He found one for Fitzroy and handed it to him.
Fitzroy took it, but also took Cliopher's hand in his. "You're bleeding," he said in alarm.
"Am I?" Cliopher looked at his hand and—oh. He had clutched the forgotten white shell so tightly against his palm that a thin red line had appeared.
"It's nothing," Cliopher said in embarrassment.
Fitzroy didn't dignify that with a response. He dabbed gently at the cut instead.
This accomplished, Fitzroy touched the shell with one careful finger. "What's this?" he asked.
For an instant, fear stopped Cliopher's throat. He swallowed it down. "It's a shell," he said, and flushed.
Fitzroy didn't react to the stunning obviousness of the statement. "What kind of shell?"
He could do this. He could. "This one is a clam. It's just—a common, ordinary shell, the sort that you might find on any beach."
"Yes?" Fitzroy asked softly. As though he knew there was more.
Cliopher drew a breath. Let it out. Met his lord's eyes. "In language, we call shells of this kind fanoa."
Fitzroy studied him, his eyes as soft and warm as a golden sunset. Under his gaze, Cliopher felt as transparent as glass. Fitzroy said softly, "Is there a story in the Lays about these fanoa?"
"Many," whispered Cliopher. His heart lodged in his throat, constricted his lungs; it was too big, too much, even here in this private little bubble of darkness. His hands were shaking. Fitzroy reached out—slowly, so that Cliopher could have pulled away if he wanted, but he had never wanted anything less—and enveloped Cliopher's hands in his own, his palms warm and decadently soft. His fingers, brushing the backs of Cliopher's hands, had a faint burr of harp calluses, a reminder that he was both, that he could be Fitzroy Angursell and the Sun-on-Earth and always, always, that inner man whom Cliopher loved.
"You don't have to tell me," murmured Fitzroy. "Not now, or not ever, if—"
"No," said Cliopher, his hands spasming in the warm cocoon of Fitzroy's fingers. He turned his hands so that he was gripping back, anchoring himself to the moment, to Fitzroy, and not to the fear which had sent him out here alone. "I do. I want to. It—Aurelius and Elonoa'a. They were fanoa."
Fitzroy's expression drew down into the solemn, puzzled expression he habitually wore when Cliopher had made a leap in accounting logic he had not been able to follow. "They were turned into shells?"
"No." Cliopher huffed out a laugh. "No, I'm sorry. It came to mean trading partners. And then, friends. More than friends. The person you would—the person you would follow into Sky Ocean. The other half of your shell, the mirror and match."
Fitzroy looked down at their hands, cupped together with the broken shell between them, as if all the greatest treasures of the world were held there in the palms of their hands. "Oh," he said, very quietly, as if he—the greatest poet the Nine Worlds had ever seen, from whom words flowed like water—as if he had been struck speechless.
Now that he had started speaking, Cliopher couldn't stop. Perhaps it was the darkness, and the quiet lapping of the water against the wooden posts of the jetty. Perhaps it was the starlight, glimmering over his lord's—Fitzroy Angursell's—bowed head, losing itself in the dense cloud of his hair, shining on the pale shell in his hands. Perhaps it was the unreality of it all, that he had been able to lose himself in that song—that they had, impossibly, been able to meet there, despite the great distance otherwise between them.
He was aware of the distance, almost as a tangible thing. Of how far he had come, to free his lord, to step up and extend a hand to help the shining god off his shining throne, to—
He had not known the god was a trickster, though he had so often seen the laughter in his eyes. He had never known. His Radiancy had never said—had not deemed Cliopher worthy of this secret of his heart. Or—had not said, anyway. But Cliopher could not be anybody else than who he was, worthy or not, lost or found.
"I always dreamed of having a fanoa," he said, to the breeze that cooled the tears on his cheeks. To the rustle in the reeds. To the breathing stillness of the Woods.
"The other half of your shell." Fitzroy's beautiful voice had a quiver in it. Cliopher looked at him sharply. "Your—more than friend. The person who meant everything to you. A... spouse?"
"No." He had not meant that to come out so emphatically, but it did. "It's not—it's old-fashioned. It's—not about starting a family, necessarily, or about sex." It was amazing how much easier it was to say this, now that he knew it was impossible. As though being stranded out here in this hard, lonely place was making it all clearer to view. "It's—it recognises a commitment, like a marriage, but it's different."
"It recognises a commitment?" Fitzroy looked up, and Cliopher saw that his face was shining too.
"Yes." Cliopher's hands looked smaller than he might have expected, cradled between Fitzroy's. Those long dark fingers were tightening around his, and he knew that when they let go it would be farewell. He felt as fathomless as the open ocean, and as bare of life. As dark as this quiet river. "I had wanted—"
He had wanted what he could never have. He had always wanted too much, and never been enough to earn it. He could no more commit himself to Fitzroy Angursell than he could marry Jullanar of the Sea. What was there in Cliopher Mdang, to earn that?
It was enough that they had sung together.
It would have to be enough.
Fitzroy let go, but only with one hand. He was fumbling in his pocket. "You wanted—"
There was something pale between Fitzroy's fingers. Cliopher stared at it, numb.
"Cliopher." Fitzroy hesitated. "Kip. Kip—you sang with me, and I found this."
He held it out. A small, imperfect, ordinary white shell. A clam shell. A fanoa. With his other hand, he lifted Cliopher's hands, and placed it carefully next to its other half.
Cliopher could only look at it, and then up to the man who had given it to him. His heart was stuttering strangely in his chest, as though it felt the cage of his ribs as a restraint.
"It seems to me," said Fitzroy, very quietly, "that few people on Zunidh or in any other world have sworn themselves to one another with a fraction of the love and loyalty that you have shown me, Cliopher Mdang. It seems to me that we have worked together for nearly a thousand years. It seems to me that—that you—" his voice broke, "—you saved me. From the priests. From the court. From the emperor. It—if you don't want me—if you don't want this—I'll go—"
The distant ocean was pounding in Cliopher's ears. He couldn't have heard—this wasn't—Fitzroy's fingers were sliding away from his, and that was all at once the most important and terrifying fact in all the universe. His hands turned, the shell between them. "Stay."
Fitzroy stilled, no longer pulling away, a lingering echo of his old serenity. Cliopher tightened his grip and leaned in, searching for the animation in Fitzroy’s expression, the feeling beneath. "Stay," he repeated, more difficult the second time, a whisper that seemed to shout his whole heart to the world, to the stars and the river and Fitzroy’s gold-spark eyes. "Please."
The stillness spread out from their joined hands. Please, echoed the rushes, and please the breeze rippled over the surface of the river, and please the water sang under the struts of the jetty.
Fitzroy studied him. Cliopher's breath caught.
The stars pinned the sky. The trees were dimly perceived pillars of the night. The shells nestled together in his cupped hands.
Fitzroy's fingers closed over his again, cradling the fanoa between them. "Always." His voice was hoarse with—he cleared his throat. "As long as you want me."
Cliopher clasped back. "Forever, then."
It was starlight that gleamed on the wetness on Fitzroy's cheeks. "Forever," he agreed, "and a day. And all the days after that, too."